News

How Does Translation Software Save on Support Costs?

June 9, 2016

By Ivy Hughes

Everyone likes to save money. Some businesses do it by choosing not to offer multilingual customer support. Some businesses hire teams of multilingual customer support agents for all the languages they want to support. Others pay for costly human translations. Others provide basic, machine-only translations. While machine translation can be helpful, if you’ve ever typed something into Google Translate, you know machine translations sometimes miss meaning entirely.

We know that the translation process is confusing. It’s hard to decide which type of translation to pay for and which languages to cover. We feel that when it comes to translation and localization, the easiest way to please customers and save money is to offer a combination of machine and human translation.

Our product suite, LinguistNow, offers both human and machine translations and reduces the amount of money our clients have had to spend on customer support by:

Article translation so customers can help themselves, reducing the number of support tickets that support agents are required to answer. Read more about the value of FAQs and self-service customers here.

Providing machine translations, human translations, or a combination of both - embedded directly within the CRM - so English-speaking customer services agents can read and respond to questions from customers who speak another language.

Providing excellent translations so customers don’t have to go back to the customer service reps for help.

Removing the need for native speaking customer support agents.

Reducing the number of managers needed to support support staff.

By essentially giving English-speaking customer service reps the ability to communicate in any language at any time, we give our clients one hundred languages for the price of one. Because of this, our clients either don’t need to add multi-lingual reps or can add them at a much slower rate. This reduces support staff and managerial costs.

Depending on how many languages our clients need to speak, we can often cut their monthly costs related to one customer service agent by half. The volume of savings of course, depends on numerous variables such as volume of incidents in that language, existing support staff costs, and type of translations needed (machine versus human).

For our clients, saving cash and helping customers is the definition of a win-win situation. Take a look:

“If we’re able to provide a translated article to someone in Sweden…that person does not have to write to us to get a response, then […] we’re not having to handle that email, and the customer is happier because he gets a response in real-time instead of having to wait for a response in a foreign language,” said Michael Boring, process manager, Service & Sales, for Shutterstock. “We’ve become more efficient as a team, saving us hours of work and money, too.”

“It’s helped us keep our team small and manageable because it’s easy to use and easy to implement,” said Colby Parrott with SurveyMonkey. “Today, only two people are needed to handle all of our languages.”

IRobot saw a reduction of 41 percent in its support costs after FAQ content was translated.

We have this really nifty cash saving calculator that we’ve developed for clients who want a rough estimate of how much LinguistNow might actually save them. If you’d like to see how much money LinguistNow might save your company, contact us!